Colonel Autumn sighed as he leaned back in his chair, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He blinked and returned his hand to the warmth of his coffee mug, a comforting contrast to the chill of the climate-controlled office. It was a wonder that a facility with so many people, computers, and machinery generating heat could be so frigid, especially considering the blistering wasteland above.
“Colonel, good morning!” the president practically sang over the intercom. Autumn brought the mug to his lips to excuse himself from replying. That voice was too cheery to be masking anything but criticism.
“Mr. President.” Autumn finally responded. “This is about the purifier?”
“Yes it is. It seems you’re about to get your wish, Colonel—there’s a camp of super mutants near the river, and they’ve been scouting the area around the Jefferson Memorial for the past few days. I think they’re about to make a move for it. When they do, be it in a couple days or a couple hours, we can probably consider the purifier lost for good.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t want to tie men down there in the first place.” Autumn dismissed. “DC’s too far and too volatile to get involved with at the moment. Besides, you agreed with me about waiting until we had evidence.”
“We may just have that, Colonel. I’m sure you remember the old project leader, who we caught snooping around in a Vault suit the other day? An eyebot just picked him up leaving Rivet City and heading back to the purifier. If you hurry, you should be able to catch him.”
“And do what with him? Bring him back here for questioning?”
“Precisely. Take Forrester with you, and have him look at the purifier while you’re there. It’s not exactly his area of expertise, but he should be able to tell us if the purifier’s worth our time.”
Autumn sipped his coffee. “I’m not taking a whole company of men down there to fortify the purifier based only on a hunch, Mr. President,” he declared. “It’s too great a risk.”
“Of course! Of course!” If Eden had hands, he would have thrown them up in dramatic surrender as he smiled and backed away. “But if the old project lead is going to be at the purifier in another half hour or so, then now’s the best window of opportunity we can possibly expect, especially with the imminent threat of super mutants taking over the memorial again.”
“When do you think that’ll happen?”
“It’s hard to say. It could be days, or it could be hours. They’ve been sniffing around there since Sunday afternoon. The point is, we’ve got to check out the purifier now, and see for ourselves if it has any potential. If it does, then you can decide whether occupying and fortifying it is worthwhile. If not, then you can simply grab the scientist and leave the memorial to the super mutants. It’s entirely up to you.”
Autumn stood up and opened the locker nearest his bed. “If it’ll put this thing to bed for good, then I’m in.” He took his pistol from the locker and slid it into the holster under his overcoat. “So long as you promise not to keep obsessing about it if this thing turns out to be a giant paperweight.”
Eden let out a long sigh. “Colonel… I don’t mind that we disagree on certain things. I’d even say that being forced to defend my position from your objections is downright helpful, some of the time. But please, if we’re going to argue over what is and isn’t a waste of time, you might want to make sure your own projects show promise before coming after mine.”
“Sir, the—”
“We’ve got more important things to do than argue, Colonel,” Eden said with the authoritative, end-of-discussion seriousness he reserved for when he was truly becoming angry. “I’ll tell Major Fairlight and Dr. Forrester to get a team together and meet you in the hangar. I think we’ve still got one or two Vertibirds that your precious alien hasn’t destroyed. So get down there, check out the purifier, and prove me wrong so I can start calling your projects a giant waste of time instead.”
“Yes, sir,” Autumn grumbled, slipping a few spare clips under his overcoat before ducking out of the room.
Eden’s words still echoed in Autumn’s head as his Vertibird flew low over Arlington. Dr. Forrester and a teenage lab assistant whose name tag read “Charlie” accompanied him, with Fairlight and three other soldiers riding in the second bird on his wing. The Enclave had been stepping up its activities lately, but this was the first daylight operation they’d undertaken in months. More than a few raider bands in the DC area had access to missile launchers and other military hardware that they’d plundered from Army forts and outposts. The idiot savages would shoot at anything that wasn’t one of them, and so it was dangerous to fly too close to ruins and settlements during the day. Today, though, they’d been lucky so far, and the Vertibirds moved fast enough that even if they were fired on they could normally avoid being hit.
Instead, Autumn fixated on Eden’s last remarks—the alien was becoming a waste of time, and had already proven herself incredibly dangerous. Without answers from her, without her cooperation, the wasteful option of killing her and cutting her open became more and more appealing by the day. They then ran the risk of not being able to learn anything about her apparently magical abilities, but at least they could study her chitin and potentially learn some ideas about how to make lighter, more durable power armor. It was better than tying men down on guard duty while she planned her next escape attempt.
As if reading his mind, the wild-haired, bespectacled weapons tech specialist seated beside him spoke up. “You know, I’m surprised to see you pull yourself away from that overgrown insect you’ve got Anderson working on. Have things improved since the weekend?”
“No…” Autumn admitted. “She’s not responded to kindness or threats. Fairlight wants to start beating on her, just for all the damage she caused if not to get her to open up, but Anderson keeps stubbornly insisting against torture.”
“Well, it makes sense,” Forrester contemplated. “Effective torture requires almost as much knowledge of a subject’s anatomy as medicine. You have to know how to inflict pain without causing serious wounds, or at least wounds you can’t easily treat on the spot. If you just go around bludgeoning a subject until they speak, you run the risk of damaging their internal organs and making them bleed to death on the inside. Good torture is subtle, and every bit as psychological as it is physiological. Without a solid knowledge of how her body and mind operate, you can’t effectively torture her. And since a solid knowledge of her body and mind is the intended goal of your interrogation, you’re doomed to go in circles forever.”
Autumn shrugged. “We’re not getting anywhere with her, though. Anderson tried talking gently to her, and she just stared at him until he gave up. Fairlight pointed guns in her face, and she didn’t even blink. We tried starving her in isolation for a day, then offering food only if she was willing to talk… nothing’s worked. The only time any of us have heard her speak was when she was impersonating Anderson.”
“Hmm…” Forrester frowned. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the Vertibird’s pilot waved over his shoulder to get Autumn’s attention. “Colonel, sorry to interrupt. The President just contacted us over the radio. He says it’s urgent.”
“Patch it through the intercom,” Autumn instructed. The pilot mumbled something in the way of affirmation, and Eden’s voice filled the cramped aircraft cabin.
“Colonel, we’ve got a problem,” he said simply. “I’m looking at the image from our eyebot in the area, and the super mutants are rallying in the middle of their camp. They’re going to move on the purifier any minute.”
“We’re still a minute or so out,” Autumn guessed. “What do you want us to do? We don’t have enough men to take them head-on.”
“I can buy you a little bit of time with an eyebot,” Eden suggested, “so we can still proceed as planned. We had three in the Jefferson Memorial area, but a bunch of idiot raiders ambushed one and disabled it. I sent another to drive them off, maybe have you recover the wreckage while you were in the area, but they got that one, too. If you’re willing to go in blind, I can detonate the last one’s suicide charge close to the wall of the super mutant camp, near where they keep the prisoners. When they scatter, the mutants might waste time chasing them around and give you enough time to make an extraction. Just get the scientist out of there, take a quick peek at the purifier, and get out. It’s not ideal, but we can’t just give up on this and let super mutants kill the expert.”
“Do it,” Autumn agreed, ignoring the wide-eyed expression on the teenager sitting opposite him. “Pilot, get the other bird on intercom.” The pilot tapped a few controls on his console, and the speakers crackled with static.
“Fairlight,” came the answer a moment later.
“Major, change of plans. Super mutants are about to move, so we’ve got to make this fast. I still want Forrester to take a look at the purifier if we can, but the priority is extracting the scientist. We can’t let his knowledge die with the super mutants.”
“Understood, Colonel. We’ll hit the memorial as soon as we touch down.”
“Ten seconds!” the pilot announced. Autumn fought to stand as the Vertibird’s floor tilted hard. The familiar groan of hydraulics signaled the deployment of the landing gear and the angling of the rotors as the aircraft swooped in to land. A second later, the Vertibird lurched, and Autumn pushed open the door. His boots hit the dirt, and a hand went instinctively up to shield his eyes from the dust whipped up by the downdraft. The last of the soldiers from the other bird was already out, and with a whine from its rotors it ascended back into the sky.
“Stack up on me!” Fairlight shouted to his squad, his voice barely audible over the roar of the Vertibird engines. “We breach on my mark!”
Autumn heard two more pairs of boots crunch into the soil behind him, and he turned to stop the younger lab tech.
“You, stay out here and keep watch. You see any movement from the other side of that bridge, you stick your head inside and start shouting. Alright?”
“Uh…sure…yes, sir,” he hesitated. Autumn shot him a stern look.
“Kid, we don’t have the luxury of cowardice right now. We’ve got no idea how much time Eden’s bought us with that eyebot, and there’s only one way in and out of this memorial. I need you to step it up here. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir,” he said with marginally more conviction. He was weak, and it was a miracle he was still alive in an environment as results-oriented as Raven Rock, but he was what Forrester had dragged along, and their only real option.
Fairlight kicked in the memorial’s door, and the four of them stormed inside. “Hallway, clear!” someone shouted, and four pairs of power armored boots thundered into the darkness. Autumn drew his pistol and followed, adrenaline coursing through his veins and Forrester close on his heels. The last traces of Vertibird rotor noise trailed off, and Autumn was left with nothing but the pounding of boots and his own breathing.
The corridor was typical faded Washington splendor; the high ceiling was cracked and filthy, the walls looked badly decayed, and various broken bits of debris littered the floor. Autumn pressed forward down the slope, towards a three-way intersection. The path ahead was almost completely blocked with debris, and the resonant, howling bass note coming from further beyond the piled junk gave the impression of a ventilation tunnel. That left right as the only option, towards the gift shop and small museum built into the base of the memorial.
A boot hit a door further ahead. “Restrooms, clear!”
“All clear! Move up!”
Servomotors whined and boots stomped in cadence, and Autumn followed the noise of the assault squad through what used to be the main lobby area. It’d been fortified with sandbags, and dust-covered shell casings littered the floor. Anywhere else, these signs of battle would have been too commonplace to bother paying attention to, but this was meant to be a scientific installation with unrealized humanitarian goals at heart. Gunfire and cutting edge science went together about as well as twenty years of neglect and cutting age science. As the soldiers swept through the museum ahead, Autumn feared what was to come.
“Come on,” he urged Forrester, and the two of them hurried to catch up with Fairlight’s team. With every shouted “Clear!”, he was growing more and more perplexed. Eden had tagged the project lead heading back to the purifier. They’d arrived no more than twenty minutes after he was predicted to show up, and yet he was apparently not here.
“All clear, Major,” one of the soldiers reported as he stepped back into the museum from the rotunda.
“He’s not here?” Autumn asked, stepping over the remnants of a desk.
Fairlight shook his head. Except for the distant, echoed rumbling of water, the entire facility was silent. “Looks that way, sir.”
“Are we too late, or too early?” Autumn leaned against the desk. “We can’t exactly afford to wait around for him to get here.”
Forrester looked up from a giant, refrigerator-sized computer he was studying. “This all looks like data storage, for project notes and experiment results. Doesn’t look like much of it’s working, either.”
“Can we proceed without the data?”
“Well, yes, but it’ll set us back a long way if we can’t rely on their experience. We should check out the rotunda. No sense worrying about twenty-year-old data if the whole project’s a bust.”
Fairlight led them into the memorial’s central room, and Forrester stifled a gasp. The Rivet City scientists had transformed the rotunda into an enormous water tank, surrounded by all sorts of equipment, computers, and power cables. This was surely the heart of the whole operation, the purifier itself.
Colonel Autumn approached the imposing thing, stepping carefully up the stairs into the glass-encased central ring. The rusted floor creaked under his weight, and an omnipresent far-off rumbling reminded him that the machine’s structure had likely been severely compromised. After two decades of direct contact with water with no maintenance of any kind, it was a wonder the thing was still standing.
Through the sturdy, reinforced glass of the water tank, various chunks of garbage swam in a greenish sea of filthy, stagnant water. A hazy, silhouetted figure stood perfectly still in the center, and Autumn smirked uneasily; one of the nation’s architects and most respected historical figures was symbolically drowning in two decades’ worth of irradiated muck.
“Colonel, this is…creative,” said Forrester, who’d found a crude sketch of the memorial and all its modifications. “It looks like the pumping equipment in the memorial’s lower levels existed well before the war, and they’ve converted it to pump water directly into the rotunda. The actual purifier was erected on-site, and they’ve solved the problem of powering the thing by hooking up a line of things marked ‘fusion cells.’ If they’re talking about the microfusion energy cells used in cars before the war, then they could theoretically run the purifier for years, although I’m surprised they managed to get this many operational. Most car cells haven’t stood up very well to the elements.”
“Hmm.” Most of Forrester’s technical run-down didn’t interest Autumn, but the mention of lower levels did. “Major, the memorial has lower levels beneath the museum basement. It’s possible our man could be hiding down there.”
“Yes sir,” Fairlight’s muffled voice responded. “Some of these doors are blocked with chairs, waste bins, benches, that sort of thing. We’ll look for a way down.”
Autumn frowned. “As far as we know, there’s just the one scientist. If he’s down there, someone barricaded him inside.”
“Maybe there’s another entrance, like a maintenance access to the sewer system,” Forrester suggested. “The sort of flood control equipment they’d need to run a purifier this large… it wouldn’t make sense if it was just built for the memorial. It’s got to be part of a larger system.”
“Let’s see about that basement, then,” said Autumn, impatiently checking his watch, “unless there’s more to see up here.” He took a step towards the airlock.
Forrester quickly glanced around the rotunda again. “No… I don’t think so, not without getting a whole team in here. Except—” he stopped to pick up a holotape someone had left atop a computer. “No dust. This is recent. Might have a clue to our scientist’s current whereabouts.”
“Good work,” Autumn nodded, stepping down from the airlock. “We’ll give that a listen when we get back to Raven Rock. Major! Do we have a basement door yet?”
Autumn came through the museum door in time to see an Enclave soldier kick over a rusted file cabinet with a heavy wooden bench propped atop it. The cabinet coughed up a storm of ancient paperwork that swirled across the floor, and the bench merely crumbled into splinters. Fairlight kicked apart the half of it that survived, and yanked the door open to reveal a flight of stairs. Even from across the room, Autumn could see a welcoming incandescence trickling up from below. It was clear the basement was hardly abandoned.
“Yes, Colonel, we do,” Fairlight answered the earlier question. “We haven’t found any beds, yet, either, so I assume living quarters are downstairs as well.”
“Good work, Major,” Autumn almost smiled. “Have your men search the basement, and—”
“Colonel Autumn!” Hurried footsteps echoed off the hard stone walls as someone frantically sprinted down the memorial’s corridors. “Colonel Autumn!”
“Oh, no.”
The lab assistant he’d put on lookout duty reached the museum, panting heavily. “Colonel Autumn, they’re…” he shrugged and weakly pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “They’re coming over the bridge.”
It was like someone had parked a Vertibird on Autumn’s chest. They were so close to finding what they’d come for, but Eden’s eyebot ruse hadn’t bought quite enough time. They had to abort, and they had to do it fast.
“Alright, everyone out!” he ordered. “Back out through the gift shop, double time! Major, signal the Vertibirds for extraction.”
“Um, Colonel, what about what I said earlier, about a way out through the lower—”
“Even if it exists, it might be caved in. We can’t take that chance. Out.”
“But sir…” it was Fairlight’s turn to object. “What if the scientist’s down there? You want to just leave him for the super mutants?”
Autumn ran a worried hand through his hair. He could practically hear the marching super mutants coming to slaughter them in the close quarters. They had seconds, at best. No time to search the basement, but enough time to warn anyone hiding below. He stuck his head through the door and tried to listen for any hint of movement, but nothing stood out.
“This is Colonel Augustus Autumn of the Enclave,” he announced down the stairs, the echo of his voice filling him with confidence that anyone hiding below would surely hear him. “In a matter of minutes, this facility will be overrun by super mutants. We can protect you if you come with us, but we have to leave now.”
Still there was silence. No voices, no footsteps, no clattering of objects knocked to the floor. The basement seemed to be empty. Fairlight shook his head.
“Suit yourself,” Autumn resigned. “Alright, we’ve wasted enough time. Move!”
Fairlight’s boot blasted open the door to the outside, and the four men in power armor rushed out into the blinding DC sun. Already, the horde of mutants was coming around the side of the memorial. A line of lightly-armored, hammer-toting mutants led the march, followed up by riflemen and heavy gunners. A handful of blackened stumps blocked the mutants’ line of sight, but they didn’t have much time. Fairlight gestured for everyone to crouch, and try to hide up against the side of the memorial stairs.
“Alright, listen up,” he said. “They haven’t seen us yet. Keep low, move fast, and head up the ramp here. We’ll double back around and have the Vertibirds pick us up on the open ground behind the memorial.”
Autumn nodded his agreement, and Fairlight led them forward. His whole body felt tense; he knew he’d hear the shouting of super mutants any minute. A group of seven humans was hardly capable of sneaking through anywhere easily, and he was sure that they’d be seen.
Instead, it was the hum of Vertibird rotors that betrayed them. Just as Fairlight was about to tell their ride out of here to hold off until they’d finished circling the memorial, the distant rumble of engines drew the mutants’ attention. Autumn reached the top of the rusting yellow fortification spanning the memorial steps, and turned to see a few dozen bald orange heads turning in all directions. A shirtless mutant wielding a sledgehammer figured out the sound was coming from across the tidal basin, and when he looked up to the memorial he locked eyes with Colonel Autumn.
He howled, and the whole group turned to see what he’d seen. Seven new prisoners, to replace some of the ones they’d lost. Immediately, without any officer to give the order or leader to take the first step, the whole shrieking mass of them broke into an all-out charge. The Vertibirds were halfway across the basin, seconds away from landing, but Fairlight knew there was no way they’d beat the super mutant charge.
“Grenades,” he ordered. He pulled one of the grenades from his belt, primed the charge, and hurled the thing at the feet of the forward ranks, his men doing the same. The world shook beneath their feet as all four grenades detonated into a blinding neon flash.
Molten plasma sprayed everywhere, and their hellish roars changed instantly into agonized screams. Two of the mutants exploded into goo on the spot, and another stumbled forward to dive face-first into the dirt. Fairlight’s grenade had gone off right beside him, and the burst of plasma had instantly melted his entire leg. Another body slumped backwards, smoke pouring out of its collapsing chest and face. The front line had been obliterated, and all the following mutants paused their charge and backpedaled to regroup.
Fairlight wasted no time in opening fire with his rifle, blindly hurling bolts into the dissipating grenade flash. A few more mutants went down, their toughened skin useless against superheated plasma. A rifle shot pinged harmlessly off his armored pauldron, and Fairlight turned to send a return shot into the sniper’s shooting arm.
Wind gusted down over the group, and the first Vertibird angled itself in to land. The other circled around into a wide arc, sweeping low over the basin again to give its partner time to load up. Autumn shielded his face from the wind and dust and ran over toward the site the bird had chosen to land. More bullets ricocheted off the railings, dangerously close to ending him.
“Whoa, get down!” one of Fairlight’s men shouted behind him, his warning followed immediately by the unmistakable fwoosh of a rocket launcher being fired. The projectile flew right under the Vertibird, narrowly missing its rotor and flying off over the basin. A foot higher, and the Vertibird would have been blown apart.
“It’s too hot! You can’t land!” Fairlight shouted over the radio in his helmet. The pilot complied and pulled up before the mutants could load another shot. Autumn watched it ascend, cursing under his breath. They needed to get out of here, and fast.
“Yaaah!” screamed a super mutant, drawing Autumn’s attention back to the ramp. A mutant wearing car parts and road signs for armor broke through the shooting and charged up the ramp, swinging a sledgehammer wildly in front of him. Plasma bolts struck him all over, melting huge sores into his flesh and armor, but he got in a hard sideways swing at Fairlight before the others brought him down.
Fairlight toppled into the badly decayed railing, nearly going right through it. The mutant fell on top of him, finally done in by the last plasma bolt to the back of his head. The breach threw the other soldiers off balance, and more mutants were storming up the ramp in no time.
“Fall back!” Fairlight kicked the carcass off himself and hurried to his feet. “Jackson, throw a grenade!”
Fairlight rushed back off the line and crouched next to the Colonel and the others. The grenade went off behind him, another blinding flash of molten plasma buying them a bit more breathing room. Jackson and the other two backed up, surrendering the ramp and hoping it would create enough of a bottleneck to hold off the attack for long enough.
“Major, we need out of here, now,” Autumn insisted. “Take out the one with the launcher and we can call the Vertibird back.”
Fairlight shook his head. “Better plan, Colonel. The four of us can fall back to the other ramp, and have the bird pick us up on the grass over there. These guys are running low on ammo, but we’ve got about half a dozen grenades between us. They fall back slower than we run to cover our exit, the mutants bottleneck up the ramp, and our guys hit ‘em again and again with grenades. With any luck, they’ll break on that defense and regroup, and in that window we’ll have the other bird pull them out. Good?”
“We’re making three men stand and fight off a small army so that we can make a run for it?” Forrester objected.
“Yes, so you damn well better appreciate their efforts. Colonel?”
Before Autumn could even answer, one of Fairlight’s men got a lucky hit on the mutant carrying the missile launcher. A plasma bolt took off the side of his neck, and in his stunned confusion he fired the launcher directly into the back of the mutant standing in front of him. Half the horde exploded, flinging various bits of blood and gore and something that looked like a leg into the sky. The mutants just outside the blast radius were knocked over by the shockwave, and the rest of them couldn’t help but look for the source of the carnage in shocked confusion. If ever there was going to be a pause to their attack, it was now.
“Go! Now!” Fairlight ordered, dragging Forrester to his feet and shoving him down the walkway. He took the two grenades from his belt and handed them to Jackson. “Fall back slow, hit ‘em with these. Buy yourself a window to get clear.”
Jackson nodded, and prepared to throw the first of the grenades. Fairlight left them there, and ran to catch up with the others.
“Take point, Major,” Autumn insisted, pushing Fairlight to the head of the group, “in case they’ve gotten smart and tried to flank us.”
They hadn’t. Explosions, gunfire, and the shrieking of wounded super mutants came from behind them, but the east side of the memorial was completely deserted. Fairlight told the pilots the plan over the radio, and the first of the pair was already waiting for them, its downdraft whipping up the dead grass and loose trash and flinging it all over the place.
Another two explosions went off in rapid succession behind them. Jackson’s voice came over the radio.
“Major, we’ve got a window. We’re pulling out once the bird gets here.”
“Understood. We’ve got enough of a lead on them that we should be in the clear.”
Fairlight ran down the ramp and across the broken ground to the Vertibird, checking from side to side for super mutants. He pulled open the door, then crouched down and took aim back up the ramp where they’d come from. They didn’t have long before mutants were on them, but it was long enough for Autumn, Forrester, and Charlie to climb up into the safety of the Vertibird.
Fairlight went in last, closing the door behind him. The rotors spun up faster, hydraulics whined in the wings, and the aircraft rocked back and to the right. They were airborne, home free, able to finally breathe a sigh of relief on the way back to base…
“Uh, Colonel, we’ve got a problem,” the pilot spoke up.
“What is it?”
“Take a look out the side door, 10 o’clock.”
Fairlight stood up and crossed the Vertibird’s cramped interior, pushing open the other door. “Oh, shit.”
“What is it?” Autumn leaned over to see outside. The other Vertibird had apparently already made its pickup, but a gigantic super mutant had reached it before it could fly away. He stood head and shoulders above the others and wore the hood of a car as a chestplate. His huge hands had the tail of the Vertibird in a death grip, the muscles in his arms bulging with the strain of holding the bird down. Both rotors were locked forward, straining hard against him as he desperately pulled backwards to bring the Vertibird in. Already weighed down by three soldiers in heavy power armor, there was no way the thing was getting free on its own.
Hydraulics whined as the landing gear went down. “I’ll set you down on the other side of that structure, and—”
“No,” Fairlight stopped him. “There’s no time. Hold steady here, and I’ll take the shot.”
“I’ll do what I can.” The bird leveled out, maybe two hundred feet above the tidal basin. For the most part, the pilot held the bird steady, but there was only so much he could do. The vibration from the engines and the wind rushing by were impossible to fully compensate for.
“Rifle,” Fairlight demanded, pointing to the plasma rifle beside his seat. “Now.”
Two regular mutants grabbed the larger one’s torso and added their strength to his. Another was busy clearing the jam in his hunting rifle so he could fire it again, at which point he would presumably try to shoot out the engines.
Good luck with that, buddy, Fairlight nervously smirked under his helmet. Charlie handed him the rifle, and he brought it to his shoulder. He took aim, placing the oversized super mutant’s upper chest right in line with his sights. Plasma rifles were more accurate than most energy weapons, but they were designed for medium-range stopping power over long-range precision.
Fairlight’s finger tensed on the trigger.
Then a mutant with a minigun put a whole bunch of rounds into the Vertibird’s side, and the pilot yanked the stick hard to the right. Fairlight went over backwards, losing grip on the rifle and slamming hard into the bench he’d been seated at previously. Then the Vertibird rolled back left, and Fairlight’s mind was filled with images of the only rifle they had sliding right out the side of the aircraft and into the tidal basin.
He jumped for it, catching the stock and wrapping his free hand around the back of the pilot’s chair. The landing knocked the spare microfusion cells from his belt, and he had no free hands to stop them from rolling away. Something else slid across the floor, too, but Fairlight’s face was pressed into the back of the pilot’s chair and he couldn’t see what it was. Then the scraping stopped, and that something went out the door.
“Charlie!” Forrester yelled, practically leaping across the Vertibird to the door. Fairlight picked himself up and took a single sideways glance out the door. Charlie had gone out, but somehow he’d managed to grab onto the extended landing gear. Forrester reached out for him, but it was too far. He’d gone down below the bottom of the hull itself, and just barely snagged the tire with both hands. He was panicking, understandably terrified by the idea of dangling out the side of a Vertibird, and obviously letting the fear get the better of. Rather than calm down and attempt to climb back inside, which felt risky as it meant temporarily taking a hand away from the relative safety of the landing gear, he was going to do what everyone else unfit for military service did—shriek and wail and kick his legs around until someone more capable stepped in to help.
“Take us lower,” Fairlight told the pilot, as Autumn joined Forrester at the left side. “And turn us around. Quick, before that idiot starts shooting again.”
The Vertibird spun, and Charlie’s panicked cries from below grew more intense. Forrester was saying something to try and calm him down, but Fairlight was singularly focused on his task and didn’t fully hear it. He pushed open the other door, shouldered his rifle, took aim, and fired. The bolt hit the super mutant right in the forearm, melting through the toughened skin and boiling away the blood. The pain was too unbearable for him to endure, and the Vertibird tail slipped from his grasp.
It flew up, rocketing away from the Jefferson Memorial and back into the safety of the sky. Fairlight turned and fired again, this time aiming at the minigun-toting mutant standing further down along the scaffold. The plasma bolt strayed further off course this time, hitting the mutant in the side of the calf. Even from high up, it was obviously no more than a graze, as the mutant merely fell to his knee for a moment before recovering. Fairlight took aim at his upper torso and pulled the trigger one more time, but the rifle did nothing; its microfusion cell had run dry.
“I’m slipping!” Fairlight heard the kid cry.
“Hold on, we’re gonna get you back up here,” Forrester promised.
Grumbling under his breath, Fairlight set the rifle back against the inside wall, pulling the door closed behind him. He took the 10-millimeter SMG off the wall beside the pilot’s chair—a personal defense weapon in case the Vertibird went down—and took one huge step across the width of the Vertibird’s interior. The clomp of his boot and the accompanying hiss of its servos made Forrester look up, probably hoping he’d turn over his rifle so they could dangle it over the side of the Vertibird for an hour trying to pull Charlie up with it.
Instead, he brought up the SMG and took aim. He fired once, and a spurt of blood flew from Charlie’s forearm. The kid yelped and let go, falling away from the Vertibird and down towards the greenish waters of the tidal basin. He fell down, flailing all his limbs about in a panic, and hit the water on his back. The splash exploded out in all directions, and he disappeared beneath the foam.
“What the fuck did you do that for?!” Forrester yelled, holding back a punch when he realized he’d only hurt himself by punching power armor. “You shot him!”
“Pilot, come about and buzz the shoreline, fast and low,” Fairlight ordered, ignoring Forrester completely. Perhaps out of fear of being shot next, or perhaps out of genuine loyalty, the pilot complied. Fairlight pushed Forrester aside and took aim out the open door as the Vertibird swayed and rocked into its run. Gunfire peppered the Vertibird’s hull once more, two rounds from the minigun finding the open door and pinging off Fairlight’s armor. He took aim on the ugly orange bastard and let loose with the SMG. The SMG ate through its banana clip in seconds, flinging a torrent of shell casings all over the aircraft’s interior. Thick, red spurts erupted from the mutant’s neck, shoulder, and abdomen, and he went howling down to the floor. Potshots from the other mutants struck the Vertibird at odd intervals, but none of the other mutants carried anything as dangerous as the minigun.
“Major, what the hell were you thinking?” Autumn growled.
Fairlight straightened up immediately. “Sir, the—”
“Sit down, Major,” he ordered; in full armor, Fairlight was taller, and it was exceptionally difficult to convincingly berate someone taller than oneself, even for an imposing presence like Colonel Autumn. Fairlight understood that, and so he sat.
“Sir, the Vertibird was under heavy fire. I had no choice.”
“You had ‘no choice’ but to shoot one of our own men?”
“Sir, I wasn’t trying to hit him. I was aiming for the landing strut, and I missed. You know how inaccurate 10-mil—”
“You could have shot him in the head!” Forrester yelled.
Autumn raised a hand, silencing him. Forrester clenched his fists, frustrated rage spreading across his face. But he understood that Major Fairlight actually outranked him, if they were to get technical about things, and so it was Autumn’s place to do the talking. He forced a long, exasperated sigh, and threw up his hands.
“He makes a point, Major.”
“Yes, sir. I was only trying to get him to let go, sir. Frighten him.”
“Why?”
“We were low over the water, the deepest part of the basin. The other Vertibird was clear, but we had a heavy gunner standing and my first shot only clipped him in the leg. My rifle was empty, and I lost the rest of my ammo when Charlie fell out. We had to get in closer to the shore for the SMG to be effective, and if he’d fallen into shallower water he’d be dead for sure. He made it, right?”
Autumn looked back out the door, following Forrester’s gaze to the patch of water behind them. Charlie was splashing around, treading water as the second Vertibird flew in low to retrieve him. A volley of plasma bolts flew off at the mutants while a power armor glove reached down towards the water. The belly of the Vertibird nearly dipped into the water, but the soldier finally managed to grab Charlie’s arm and hoist him into the Vertibird. The doors closed, and the aircraft tilted its rotors to fly back northwest.
The pilot looked over his shoulder. “Colonel! Other bird just called on the radio, said the kid’s shaken but otherwise fine. Bullet only grazed him, and the water was more than deep enough to break his fall.”
“But he has an open wound,” Forrester reminded them. “He just got it rinsed out with irradiated, polluted basin water!”
“Like I said, sir, I wasn’t aiming for him. I just wanted him to drop off there so he wouldn’t be dangling off the side of the bird for the gun run. Even if he managed to hold on, he’d have been an easy target for the mutants. We didn’t have time to explain that all to him, so I took a shot to scare him into letting go.”
Autumn shook his head. “You’re still responsible for shooting another member of the Enclave in the arm, deliberately, and dropping him into irradiated water. You think that’s justified?”
Fairlight hesitated for a minute, smirking nervously under his helmet. “Sir, permission to speak freely?”
“When has that ever stopped you before?” Autumn shrugged.
Fairlight leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. “Sir, if I hadn’t shot Charlie in the arm, we’d all be dead right now. We can give the kid some RadAway and antibiotics can’t we?”
“What if you’d hit him in the head?” Autumn dodged the question. “With that model gun and those conditions, it wouldn’t be unheard of.”
“Sir, I’d tell you the same thing. Better to shoot the kid dead and get away than try and save him and lose the whole Vertibird. When you’re in a bad situation like that, you sometimes have to make sacrifices to save the whole. You told me that, sir, I thought for sure you’d understand.”
“Oh, I understand, Major.” Autumn took a seat directly opposite. “But the Enclave has no use for soldiers it can’t trust, and I can’t have you shooting everything on sight and claiming it was a ‘sacrifice.’”
Fairlight stared at him for a moment. The way he’d said it, that immediate mention of broad absolutes, Fairlight could tell he wasn’t just talking about the one event. He probably even agreed with the decision, and would likely have done the same himself if their positions were swapped, but the colonel was out for any bit of leverage he could get. Fairlight sighed.
“Do you want to have another conversation about that alien thing, Colonel?”
“No, I think I’ve made my point. We’ll deal with all this later. For now, I’m more interested in talking with Dr. Forrester about the purifier.”
Forrester looked incredulous. “What? You’re just gonna… after he—”
“I know what he did, and we’ll handle it. Please, take a seat.”
“Fine.” Forrester reluctantly complied. “What do you want me to say?”
“Do you think it’ll work?”
He shrugged. “I… I suppose it shows some promise.”
“Go on.”
Forrester took a deep breath, forcing the unpleasantness with Charlie from his mind so he could focus on the science of the purifier. “Well,” he began, “in theory it seems pretty simple, but right away I can see a few problems. Obviously that holding tank in the rotunda isn’t big enough to hold and purify all the water in the basin at once, so they’ll have to pump water in, purify, it, and let it back out. The problem with that is you’ll run into a law of diminishing returns pretty fast. Assuming you mix the basin up and distribute the water evenly, and the purifier itself can handle, say, 1% of the total volume of the basin at any given time, then the second batch of water you pump through will only be about 99% irradiated. With every run, you’re drawing some of what you just purified right back into the tank, and wasting time re-purifying it. Ironically, the cleaner the basin is, the less clean water the purifier is able to put out.
“Then that’s made even worse by the intakes and outlets being located directly next to each other. Without something to distribute water around the basin better, you’ll have pockets of radiation clustering together on the far side, never even going near the purifier, while it sits there wasting power and running the same water through over and over again. Totally speculating based on numbers I’m pretty much inventing on the spot… I’d say it’ll be six months of operation before the basin is drinkable, and several years before radiation is down to trace levels.
“And at that rate, you’ll be losing quite a bit of water to evaporation. You two know the weather around here; we live in a blasted desert, where seasons don’t really mean much. August, October, February… that sun never really goes away, and it’ll be stealing a lot of water away from the basin every single day. The only way to get it back is to open the inlet gates and draw water in from the Potomac, which is heavily irradiated just like the basin itself. It’s… I see why they never got it working, Colonel. Even a brief glance at the thing with super mutants breathing down my neck, and I’m wondering what the hell they were thinking.
“Still, though,” he shrugged, “I think it’s got promise.”
“After all that, you’re going to say it’s got promise?” Fairlight scoffed. “Maybe strategically, if we wanted to go to war with the Brotherhood, but as a purifier?”
“No, no, no,” Forrester waved a hand, “The purifier’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. Or, well, I’m sure there’s been some damage in the past two decades, but the concept is absolutely solid. You take me back there, clear out the mutants, I can have it making clean water for you in a week, tops. The problem is that it’s meant to purify the Tidal Basin, the whole thing, which just isn’t possible with a facility as small—and yes, I’m calling the Jefferson Memorial ‘small’—as what they’ve got. The pipes, the sunlight, the flow of radiation from the Potomac, the law of diminishing returns. It’s a distribution problem more than a manufacturing problem, if that makes any sense. Unless you can make the water magic, and cure radiation in all the other water it touches once it leaves the purifier, clean surface drinking water just isn’t something that purifier is capable of producing in any reasonable length of time.
“Instead, we can bottle it. I didn’t take a good enough look at their outlet pipes, admittedly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already outfitted with the equipment we’d need. If it’s not, we can build it. Rig the purifier to funnel clean water into barrels, then cart those around where they’re needed. We’ve got a whole fleet of Vertibirds that basically just sit around underground for most of the time, and every one of those could hold a lot of water. If we trade the fantastical pipe dream—literally—of purifying the whole basin, we can get a much more practical result.”
“I’m all for practicality, Doctor.” Autumn nodded, already running through the logistics in his mind. “Getting enough intact barrels might be difficult, but we could set up distribution centers in all the major towns. The people of the Capital Wasteland would see their government taking action; they’d have to come to us for clean water.”
“That sure beats sitting on our asses in Raven Rock,” said Fairlight.
“Right now, all the wasteland knows of the Enclave is Eden’s voice on the radio. We don’t have the presence or the manpower to impose law upon them, if we can bring them water…”
“This is all getting ahead of ourselves, Colonel,” Forrester reminded him. “The purifier’s just been occupied by a couple dozen super mutants, and they’re not going to be leaving anytime soon. I should be able to get it working again, provided they don’t trash the place while they’re in there. But I can’t guarantee anything, even if you cleared the place out.”
“So what should I tell the president?”
“If you ask me—which you just did—I say we sit on this. Tell Eden it might be a viable option, or that it at least looks good on paper. But, we never found the scientist from the original team, so it’s possible the Brotherhood or Rivet City are still working on it. You know the Brotherhood will be quick to jump on it if they think it’ll help the poor, defenseless wastelanders, so I say we just sit and watch them. Let them clear out the mutants for us, then swoop in and take the place over.”
Autumn couldn’t argue with that. “That sounds like the best plan we’ve got, given the circumstances. I’ll let Eden know, and remind him that it’s his turn to humor me for once.” He turned to the pilot. “Are we on course for Raven Rock?”
“Yes, sir. ETA eleven minutes.”
Autumn leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. Eden’s hunch had been right, more or less. That meant the potential for good things, far down the road, and a lot of told-you-so chiding in the short term. As he sat back and listened to the droning hum of the Vertibird rotors outside, Autumn decided that it was even more crucial to get that alien prisoner talking. The purifier was, best case scenario, some weeks and months from viable. The alien, however, would become immediately useful the instant she broke her silence. If the science behind her telekinetic powers or shape-shifting capability could be understood, they’d have plenty of time to adapt them into their own technology and further stack the odds for their inevitable scrap with the Brotherhood over the purifier. At the very least, it might give them some sort of edge over the aliens themselves, if they ever took a more violent interest in humanity. All she had to do was talk, and surely she couldn’t hold out in silence much longer.
As soon as they landed, he decided, it was time to get back to work.